Old detective shows where the killer always gets caught

Quick answer: Start with Columbo for a grown-up evening and Murder, She Wrote for the whole family. Perry Mason and Matlock cover the courtroom. Poirot and Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes are the best of the British shelf, with a few darker episodes you should check before the kids wander in.

Peter Falk shuffles into a killer's mansion in a raincoat that looks slept in. He scratches his head and apologizes for bothering the man. Then he asks one more question. Forty minutes later, the genius who thought he'd pulled off the perfect crime is in handcuffs, undone by a guy who drives a beat-up Peugeot.

That's the whole appeal of the golden-age detective show. Somebody did it. Somebody decent works it out. The guilty party pays. Nobody has to sit through a season finale that ends on a cliffhanger, and nobody has to sit through a body that gets more screen time than the plot.

Columbo: the grown-up pick

Most mysteries hide the killer until the end. Columbo shows you the murder in the first ten minutes, so the fun is watching a rumpled lieutenant close the net. It's a different pleasure. You're not guessing who. You're waiting for the slip.

Start with "Murder by the Book," the first episode of the regular series in 1971. It was directed by a young Steven Spielberg, and it's a clean demonstration of how the whole thing works. Then try "Any Old Port in a Storm," where Donald Pleasence plays a wine snob who thinks he knows everything about vintages. He doesn't know enough.

Content concerns: murder in every episode, usually brief and not graphic. Some drinking, some smoking, and the occasional affair mentioned as a motive but never shown. Episodes run feature length, so plan a full evening. Fine for teens, a judgment call for younger kids.

Murder, She Wrote: the one for every age

Angela Lansbury plays Jessica Fletcher, a retired schoolteacher who became a bestselling mystery novelist and keeps stumbling over bodies. She lives in Cabot Cove, Maine, which has the highest murder rate in America and somehow never loses a resident to the moving van.

It ran twelve seasons, from 1984 to 1996, so you'll never run out. The violence is almost always offscreen. The motives are the usual ones: money, jealousy, an old secret. Jessica is kind to everybody right up until the moment she isn't.

This is the safest entry on the list for a family sitting. Younger kids may find a murder scary even when it's tame, so use your own judgment on a seven-year-old.

Perry Mason and Matlock: the courtroom pair

Raymond Burr's Perry Mason ran on CBS from 1957 to 1966. You know the formula by the second episode. A client is accused. Mason investigates with Della Street and Paul Drake. Prosecutor Hamilton Burger loses, again, when the real killer breaks down in the gallery.

That formula is a feature, not a flaw. The shows are black and white, tightly plotted, and clean. Expect murder, courtroom tension and period smoking. Nothing you'd have to cover your children's eyes for.

Matlock, with Andy Griffith as an Atlanta defense attorney who plays the country lawyer and is sharper than he lets on, is the same idea in color and from the 1980s and '90s. It's gentler than most current legal dramas. Be aware that the episodes run long and the cases get repetitive if you watch five in a row.

Poirot and Holmes: the British shelf

David Suchet played Hercule Poirot from 1989 to 2013 and adapted every one of Agatha Christie's Poirot novels and stories along the way. The early episodes are an hour long, bright, art deco, and a delight. The later feature-length films turn darker, and a few of them involve the death of a child or a bleak ending. Preview those before you commit a family night.

Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes (Granada, 1984 to 1994) stays closer to Conan Doyle than almost anything since. Start with the short stories, especially "The Speckled Band." Content concerns: Holmes's drug habit appears on screen in a few episodes, and the series treats it as a weakness rather than a hobby. Some of the stories are properly eerie. These are better for teenagers and up.

How to watch them

• Pause at the forty-minute mark. Make everybody at home commit to a guess. The loser does the dishes.
• Check the episode, not just the show. Run the eight-minute check from Vet a Movie in Eight Minutes Before Family Night on any episode you haven't seen. It works just as well for a single hour of TV.
• Watch in order when the show has a recurring cast. Poirot's later seasons mean more if you've known Hastings and Miss Lemon from the start.
• Don't binge the same show for a week. Alternate. Columbo on Tuesday, Murder, She Wrote on Sunday.

Where these shows live changes every few months. Before you sign up for another subscription, read What Your Streaming Bill Is Actually Buying You. A few of these are available free with ads, and the library often has the DVDs.

What'll annoy you

The pacing is slow by modern standards. A Columbo with a ten-minute setup tests a short attention span. Perry Mason repeats itself on purpose. Some older shows carry period attitudes about men, women and who gets treated as a suspect. The camera work looks dated, and the clothes look worse.

And the detectives aren't brooding antiheroes. Columbo is polite. Jessica Fletcher brings a casserole. Mason is a gentleman. If you want a detective who drinks his breakfast and wrecks his marriage, you'll be bored.

That's the point. Pick one episode tonight and keep the second one for the weekend. If you want something with a bigger sky, the Westerns every man should watch make a good next shelf.

The old detectives never needed the lights off to be gripping. They needed a good question, and a man polite enough to ask it one more time.